Dragic Remains on NBA.com's MVP Ladder

The individual recognition for Goran Dragic is getting nearly as consistent as the Suns guard’s game.

A day after he was named one of the participants in the 2014 Taco Bell Skills Challenge on All-Star weekend, Dragic was kept at his No. 9 spot on NBA.com’s Race to the MVP Ladder.

The Slovenian guard debuted on the list last week, when he was in the midst of his eventual Player of the Week performance and a subject of conversation after being left off the Western Conference All-Star team.

Despite back-to-back losses this week, Dragic retained his spot in the ladder, thanks in large part to his individual production.

“The beauty of a surprise season like the one Dragic and the Suns are having is seeing the complete certainty he has in his game…he's scored a combined 47 points on 15-for-28 shooting and grabbed 13 rebounds [in the last two games].”

As a sidenote, the MVP ladder highlights just one stat for each player on the list: PIE. It stands for Player Impact Estimate, which measures the overall impact a player has in the games he has played. It does that by taking into account the “percentage of game events” that player achieved.

Dragic’s current PIE is 14.3 percent, which ranks 20th in the league among players who have played at least 20 games this season. The stat probably sheds an even better light on how much Dragic and the Suns miss Eric Bledsoe, who ranks 22nd in the league in PIE.

The Suns duo forms just one of four pairs of teammates in the top 25 in the league in that stat. The other three: LeBron James and Dwyane Wade; Chris Paul and Blake Griffin; Dwight Howard and James Harden.